e Bible soon
came to have a far more powerful and absorbing interest than any of a
literary nature. There men looked for their sentence of eternal life or
eternal torment. There they sought the solution of the question: "What
shall I do to be saved?" And they sought it with all the fervor of
conscientious men who realized, as we cannot realize, the doctrine of
eternal damnation. To understand the influence of the Bible, we must
remember how completely men believed in a personal God, ruling England
then, as He had ruled Israel of old; and in a devil who stalked through
the world luring men to their perdition. The Bible was studied with a
fearful eagerness for the way to please the one and to escape the
other. Looked upon as the word of God, pointing out the only means of
salvation, men placed themselves, through the Bible, in direct
communication with the Deity, and, casting aside the authority of a
church, acknowledged responsibility to Him alone. The difficulty of
interpreting obscure portions of the Scriptures drove many to frenzy
and despair. A hopeful or consoling passage was hailed with joy. "Happy
are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." "Lo," wrote Tyndale,
"here God hath made a covenant wyth us, to mercy full unto us, yf we
wyll be mercy full one to another."

Thus two ideas became paramount: the idea of God, and the idea of
conscience. God was thought of as a judge who will reward His chosen
servants by eternal happiness, but who will deliver those who do not
know Him, or those who sin against His laws, to Satan and everlasting
fire; a God to please whom is the first object of this life, as no
pleasure and no pain here can compare with the pleasure or pain to
come. This conception of the Deity still survives among us, but it is
not realized with the intensity of men who feel the hand of God in
every incident of their lives, who fancy that the Devil in person is
among them, and who distinctly hear his tempting words. Conscience, the
guide who pointed out the path of rectitude, became strict and
self-searching, ever looking inwardly, and judging harshly, magnifying,
through the greatness of its ideal of virtue, every failing into a
crime. The natural result of these ideas seething in a brain which had
little other food was Puritanism: the subordination of all other
interests of life to the attainment of a spiritual condition acceptable
in the sight of God. Following this aim with feverish intentness, and